Newsbrands have a unique relationship with their audience:
Exploring the unique relationship that readers have with their newsbrand of choice a little further, it is evident that people demonstrate high levels of emotional engagement, trust and personal identification with their chosen newsbrand and attention levels are high. That relationship is being constantly reinforced due to the frequency of reading, and creates a significant newsbrand context effect across all platforms. Newsworks’ study ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ points towards a significant brand rub effect between advertising medium and advertiser brand.
Readers are very aware that placement of ads in newsbrands imbues those ads with certain shared values: the advertisers take on the trusted, relevant credentials of the newsbrand. Readers can readily describe the brands that they feel fit with the newsbrands’ values. Indeed, some readers think that the newspapers choose the relevant advertisers rather than vice versa. All this primes the readers to respond more favourably to advertising and the more regular and committed the reader, the stronger the effect due to the existing relationship that they have with their newsbrand. We see this across the spectrum of newsbrand platforms.
A shift towards ‘audience planning’
However, we should be mindful that because of the multi-platform world that we live in, content is no longer synonymous with the platform or device on which it is read. It is fluid across platforms. As long as people are able to access the content that they love, the platform on which they consume that content is of secondary importance.

The shift in news audiences from print to online, and from desktop digital news consumption to mobile, has brought its own set of challenges in terms of how planners and buyers are valuing news audiences. This is further compounded by the prevalence of automated audience trading in the programmatic space, which arguably fails to place a true value on an impression served in a contextually rich and trusted newsbrand environment vs that served in an aggregated or user generated content site.
Measurement and evaluation tools within the publishing industry are evolving to keep pace with technological advancements and changing consumer behaviour. However despite the shift in audience viewing behaviour, most media channels – including newsbrands – are still largely planned and bought by platform and often there is no connection made between how audiences consume those different platforms. This siloed approach means that there is no view of the total newsbrand audience reached across different platforms, making it difficult to articulate the efficiencies of audience delivery and ad effectiveness.
PAMCo is a ‘brand-first’ readership interview, where readership questions start by establishing whether the publishing brand is read on any digital or print platform, followed by more detailed questions about reading on print and digital platforms.
As a result, data now provides insight into de-duplicated audiences across all newsbrand platforms – mobile, tablet, PC and print. For the first time, this gives planners access to combined, cross platform reach data, as well as individual platform reach. It provides:
- De-duplicated reach and frequency for all platforms
- Single source data to understand how audiences move between platforms
- Improved estimate of brand reach and duplication
- Reporting newsbrand sections across print AND digital subject to sample size
- Future proofed for new platforms
- Increased number of brands reported across digital platforms
The launch of PAMCo was a significant development for agencies and advertisers as it allows planners to understand the full power and breadth of newsbrands and further reap the efficiencies of multi-platform planning by enabling a more efficient redistribution of budgets across multiple platforms. This will maximise reach and reduce the cost per thousand audience members reached.
It is not appropriate to compare PAMCo and NRS data for marketing and trading purposes as they are based on different methodologies.
Data fuels audience planning
Better data will always lead to more effective planning. Data driven planning and behavioural analytics data is the new fuel by which digital can add value to the advertising mix value. With few exceptions, no one knows more about the news content consumption habits of the UK population than newsbrands themselves.
Harnessing the power of real-time data to assess what content, themes and topics of interest resonate best with specific audiences can pay positive dividends when applied to the planning of branded content and display campaigns with newsbrands.
There is a long-established benefit to advertising in news print around the immediacy and responsiveness to which advertisers can react to day-to-day news events with their ad creative. The world of data driven planning takes this one step further and has increasingly seen newsbrands allow advertisers to respond to topical news events in near real-time with a raft of predefined creative. Add to this the fact that newsbrands have their own unique layer of first party data that they can derive significant advertiser value from and the opportunities in data planning and reaching an audience at the right time, in the right place, with the right message are abundant.
Sources:
For more information on readership please go to The market
Newsworks ‘Generation News’
Newsworks ‘The Great British Public’
Newsworks ‘Truly, Madly Deeply’
For more information about PAMCo, or to find out more about PAMCo and the staggered roll out in place to gradually move from NRS data to a full PAMCo data system, please contact the Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo).